International Consortium on Iron and the Oceans
The origin of the group stems from a July 2010 workshop sponsored by WHOI, where Buesseler and Co-Chair Richard Lampitt of the National Oceanography Centre in the UK were joined by WHOI Senior Scientist Dennis McGillicuddy and others to explore the motivation for further ocean iron fertilisation (OIF) research and develop the ISIS mission.
ISIS is "a group of institutions and scientists who are motivated to answer the unknowns regarding the role of iron in regulating the ocean's capacity to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide," the group says on its website, isisconsortium.org. "One approach to improve our understanding is to conduct open ocean iron fertilisation experiments (both in situ and with carefully designed numerical experiments) which allow scientists to study the impact of iron on marine ecosystems and to quantify its potential for CO2 removal."
Iron fertilisation to this point has been done mainly in research projects aimed at testing its effectiveness to stimulate plankton growth in limited areas of the ocean. It involves adding iron-usually chemical-grade iron sulfate-to an area of the sea in an effort to promote the growth of plankton, which, through photosynthesis, use CO2 from the surface to produce organic carbon, a small fraction of which sinks and eventually can carry carbon to the depths of the ocean and keep it there for decades to centuries.
Fourteen previous open ocean experiments have been conducted since 1993 at scales of up to fifteen kilometres across. The ISIS group hopes to conduct tests on larger scales of up to several hundred km across, deploying more numerous and diverse instruments and leveraging the power of supercomputers to help design the experiments.
Ocean fertilization has not been without its detractors. Some opponents cite environmental concerns from "geo-engineering" the ocean, while others say it could distract from efforts to reduce industry-related carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
The consortium plans to launch programmes within national government agencies and raise both public and potentially private funds from donors to organise, plan studies and ultimately finance experiments. A comprehensive program could total between USD100 million and USD200 million. Past, smaller-scale tests have ranged from USD10 million to USD15 million per experiment, Buesseler said.
He stressed that the motivation for the project is to learn more about the feasibility of ocean iron fertilization. "ISIS was formed to promote international scientific appraisal of OIF impacts, intended and unintended, and the ability to sequester carbon and thus impact atmospheric CO2," he said.
The initial 12 ISIS Consortium member institutions and scientists on the ISIS Scientific Steering Committee are:
- Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, Australia-Tom Trull
- National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom-Richard Lampitt
- Moss Landing Marine Laboratories-Kenneth Coale
- Netherlands Institute for Sea Research-Hein de Baar
- School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii-Dave Karl
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign-Don Wuebbles
- University of Maine-Fei Chai
- University of Massachusetts Boston-Meng Zhou
- University of Plymouth, Marine Institute-Maeve Lohan
- University of Rhode Island-Lew Rothstein
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution-Ken Buesseler
- Xiamen University, China-Minhan Dai
